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There’s already an abundance of alfresco fun to be found on the walls of the National Gallery, where gods, goddesses, nymphs and fauns all cavort with a vengeance. But now Chris Ofili has inserted the ultimate pleasure zone amongst the old masterly-frolics of Titian, Poussin, Rubens et al.

The Caged Bird’s Song is a sumptuous monumental tapestry in which Ofili’s painterly skills have been almost miraculously translated into thread to present a lush, limpid scene in which the arcadian landscapes of classical mythology are given a contemporary, tropical twist.

Ofili’s slightly tainted idyll is full of erotically-charged ambiguity and with strong echoes of Trinidad, the artist’s adopted Caribbean home. It takes its title from the first volume of Maya Angelou’s autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and here we are offered a world of fluidity and flux, in which messages are decidedly mixed.

A pair of lovers take centre stage, the seated man strumming his guitar and serenading a languorously female companion. Yet she seems more engrossed in her emerald green cocktail which is being poured from above in a bubbling stream by a mysterious hovering bow-tied figure. (This trickster-butler-magician is modeled on the Italian footballer Mario Balotelli, described by Ofili as “a troubled figure.”)

The duo seem oblivious to the fact that they are almost engulfed in the torrent of a cascading waterfall, while in the distance ominous storm clouds gather over a deceptively calm sea. Adding to the overall sense of unease, a huge male and female figure loom on each side panel and slyly draw back the curtains to allow us a prurient view of the proceedings.

The original watercolour design, along with a range of other studies for segments of the tapestry, is on show in an anteroom: the astonishing way in which the rapid brushstrokes and the rich rainbow pools of Ofili’s initial work on paper have been captured in this giant expanse of woven fabric is testament to the weavers of the Dovecot Tapestry studio in Edinburgh. For unlike the digitally rendered, machine-executed artist’s tapestries that are currently proliferating throughout the art world, this piece took five weavers more than two and a half painstaking years to hand-make.

Ofili built a close and trusting relationship with the Dovecot weavers, who used their intuition and expertise to reproduce the effect of his rapid brush strokes, sweeps of charcoal and delicately overlapping layers of translucent colour, blending different coloured yarns and sometimes even different kinds of fibre – wool, cotton and viscose - to give the tapestry its vividness and impact.

The Caged Bird’s Song was commissioned for the dining hall of The Clothworker’s Company, an ancient City of London livery company established in 1528 to promote the craft of cloth finishing. Before it vanishes into its permanent home, what has turned out to be one of Ofili’s finest works has thankfully been granted this four-month public stopover.

In a one-off for both the National Gallery and the artist, the saturated colours and general atmosphere of libidinousness that permeate this piece have been rendered even more striking by the tapestry being installed in a room entirely covered in a monochrome grey mural of giant swaying shadowy temple dancers.

For dedicated Ofili fans, there’s yet more watery sensuousness to be found further afield in the artist’s inaugural show for Victoria Miro’s new Venice gallery. Here he fills the canalside space with his Poolside Magic series of vivid, jewel-coloured watercolour, pastel and charcoal works on paper.

These date from 2012 and show Ofili revving up for the later tapestry studies by featuring various elegant bow-tied men in a tailcoats serving very potent-looking drinks to voluptuous naked women reclining at the water’s edge. Liquid pleasures, indeed.